Virtual Assistants: What Are the Advantages for Companies?

A virtual assistant is the collaborator of a company that provides its services remotely. It can be attached to any department and several missions can be entrusted to him/her. It is common for the employer to ask him to perform time-consuming operations such as entering or updating the databases. The virtual assistant can also provide administrative or secretarial tasks such as email management, calendar organization and electronic filing of documents.

For individual entrepreneurs or companies, using a virtual assistant can be a perfect alternative to hiring a full-time, local employee. In fact, although this option is still not widely used today, it has many significant advantages in all areas. So much, that distance is just a detail.

What tasks can be assigned to a virtual assistant?

Even if at first glance, it seems that distance is a hindrance to a complete collaboration with a virtual assistant, concretely, but it is not so. Indeed, today almost all tasks can be done remotely thanks to new IT tools made available.

You will be able to trust all your internal and external communication to a virtual assistant. Indeed, simply by giving access to all your communication platforms, you can entrust the management to them: receiving and sending emails, feeding social networks, receiving calls … In this same perspective, it can also manage all your schedule according to the proposed and planned meetings.

Apart from that, you can also delegate all the secondary tasks so that you can focus on your core business. Conduct research on the internet, manage your work files, create databases on your customer information, prepare presentations or write minutes of meetings are non-exhaustive examples of all the tasks it can perform for you.

Also, thanks to the development of online shops, you can also entrust the booking of your hotel rooms or your airline tickets for business trips or even private. Similarly, with a limited ceiling account, he can even make purchases for you.

Here, we give you a list of 57 tasks that can be assigned to a virtual assistant:

Email & Schedule Management Tasks:

1. Filtering Emails / Managing Spam
2. Database Building / Updating Contacts or CRM
3. Answering Customer Service Emails /Tickets / Chat Support
4. Sending of Greetings Cards, Event Invitations, etc.
5. Calendar Management
6. Appointment Scheduling
7. Travel Arrangement and Planning
8. Reminder Services

File Storage & Organization Tasks:

9. Dropbox / Google Drive Organization
10. Data Entry in Word, or Google Docs
11. Creating / Managing Spreadsheets
12. Preparing PowerPoint / Keynote Presentations
13. PDF Conversion, Splitting and Merging

Administrative & Blogging Tasks:

14. Transcription of Video and Audio Files
15. Simple eBook Layout / Formatting
16. Preparing Online Meeting Minutes
17. Report Creation
18. Forms Creation
19. Document Template Creation
20. Online Research
21. Data Mining & Development / Lead Generation
22. Blog Publishing Management
23. Moderating Blog Comments
24. Adding Tags & Images to Blog Posts
25. Receptionist Duties
26. Voicemail Checking
27. Sending Client Invoices
28. Basic Bookkeeping
29. Personal Errands (Purchasing Gifts Online, etc.)
30. Project Management & Training Tasks
31. Project Management Between You and Team members
32. Preparation of Training Materials
33. Training of New Virtual Staff
34. Deadline / Deliverables Tracking
35. Social Media Management Tasks
36. Creating Facebook Fan Pages / Groups
37. Posting and Scheduling Facebook Insights
38. Promoting Facebook Pages
39. Collating and Interpreting Facebook Insights
40. Creating a Twitter Account
41. Managing and Increasing Your Twitter Following
42. Schedule Tweets and Track Mentions and Hashtags
43. Create and Manage LinkedIn Account / Profile
44. Create Pinnable Images on Pinterest
45. Scheduling and Tracking Pins
46. Create and Manage YouTube Account
47. Upload Videos on YouTube
48. Moderating YouTube Comments
49. Uploading Videos to other Video Sharing Sites / Social Media
50. Answer inquiries and Messages on All Channel & Profiles
51. Create SlideShare Presentations

Email Marketing:

52. Creating a New List with Email Marketing Software
53. Adding and Removing Subscribers from Lists
54. Creating and Scheduling Broadcast Emails to Promote Content
55. Editing Follow-up Emails and Auto-responders
56. Creating Email Newsletters
57. Editing / Proofreading Emails

What are the real benefits of hiring a virtual assistant?

Hiring to a remote virtual assistant brings significantly more benefits than hiring a classic assistant. On the one hand, you will benefit from an incomparable time saving; in a single click or a call, you can entrust him with any one-off mission. On the other hand, you will see a gain in productivity. Indeed, thanks to an assistant who takes care of some heavy or repetitive tasks, you will be able to focus on the essence of your business.

Aside from that, there are other benefits specific to online assistants. In the first place, you can better control your expenses since you will have to cover only the remuneration of your assistant if previously it was also necessary to add the various expenses associated with the equipment. Secondly, with a personal assistant, you will be able to benefit from a quasi-permanent availability while a traditional assistant is only available at fixed times.

More benefits of using a virtual assistant:

1. You take a minimal risk. If the virtual assistant is not suitable, no notice to give, no risk that he declares himself ill, etc…
2. You do not have to make administrative steps: various registrations, work rules, social secretarial fees, social reports…
3. You test your managerial quality: are you competent for the delegation of tasks and management of people? It is complex to give clear instructions so that your employee or virtual assistant understands what you expect from him/her.

Outsourcing services: What Benefits?

Recruiting a virtual assistant has several positive sides. This allows an SME manager to master his salary budget. Indeed, it is more economical to use a virtual assistant located abroad rather than a full-time employee for an equal quality of work. Its organizational constraints are similarly reduced. It is not necessary to provide a workstation while the days and times of the virtual assistant are easily scalable. These services are even customizable, and you can ask him/her, to work in the evening.

The offshoring is ideal for each employee of the company to focus on its main missions. He does not waste any more time making rankings or making entries. The outsourcing of customer relationship management is also a task that can be entrusted to a remote operator. For example, it can provide technical support to users through a hotline. It is also possible to ask him/her to take charge of the files so that he/she can answer questions from clients, help them or advise them.

Choose your virtual assistant wisely.

Obviously, hiring a virtual assistant is a tricky decision to make. Confidential information will be given in the hands of a complete stranger. That’s why it’s important to choose wisely your virtual employee. He/she must be honest, reliable, competent and above all, serious.

Applying to a recognized service provider as Call Center Pros is an excellent solution to ensure reliable and high-end services. Our agents indeed meet strict criteria before joining the team of the company. They have fluent/native English and are qualified and responsive. All the missions entrusted to them are carried out within the specified deadlines with an optimal quality of work. The instructions are followed to the letter to always guarantee the satisfaction of the customers. Finally, the confidentiality clauses are constantly respected, and the information is not likely to be disclosed to third parties.

Source: https://callcenterpros.com/virtual-assistants-what-are-the-advantages-for-companies/

2023 Buyers Guide

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Automation

 

1.)

Agara Agara is an autonomous virtual voice agent powered by Real-time Voice AI. It is designed to have intelligent conversations with your customers, vendors, and partners without any assistance from human agents. It can handle a wide variety of calls including inbound customer care calls, outbound lead generation calls, appointment scheduling calls, and overdue payment recovery calls. Agara is available for several industries including banking, insurance, retail, e-commerce, airlines, and telecom. Powered by advanced Real-time Voice AI that understands speech in real-time, automatically determines the right process to follow and guides the caller along in the process with natural conversation.

2.)

Auraya EVA Voice Biometrics Powered by Auraya's patented ArmorVox engine, EVA is a voice biometric extension that provides secure and seamless identification & verification capabilities for Amazon Connect. EVA provides delightful customer experience by removing the friction of providing PINs, passwords or secret information in order to prove caller identity. EVA comes standard with active and passive modes and a simple yet powerful agent interface. This allows for personalised self-service and a more friendly and efficient experience when interacting with an agent. Outdated security methods such as PINs, passwords and security questions have become insecure and unreliable. Forgetting passwords and security answers o... (read more)Powered by Auraya's patented ArmorVox engine, EVA is a voice biometric extension that provides secure and seamless identification & verification capabilities for Amazon Connect. EVA provides delightful customer experience by removing the friction of providing PINs, passwords or secret information in order to prove caller identity. EVA comes standard with active and passive modes and a simple yet powerful agent interface. This allows for personalised self-service and a more friendly and efficient experience when interacting with an agent. Outdated security methods such as PINs, passwords and security questions have become insecure and unreliable. Forgetting passwords and security answers or switching applications to access OTPs can result in inefficient and cumbersome customer experience. Time is wasted trying to verify customers with insecure methods. EVA works in English out of the box but can be configured to work in languages other than English. Recognising what specific digits are spoken using EVA's native speech recognition is only available for the English language out of the box. EVA has additional capabilities such as real-time fraud detection and digital channel enrolment and verification options that can be turned on with customisation services from Amazon Connect consulting partners. If you are interested in these additional features, please contact an Amazon Connect consulting partner that is an authorised Auraya reseller partner.

3.)

Call Adapt Soundboard Software Call Adapt is a cloud-based digital soundboard application designed for contact centers. It works with any type of call and integrates with your existing dialer system. Powered by smart audio technology, Call Adapt gives your agents the ability to converse with customers in real time using programmed keyboard shortcuts. The result is perfect pitch delivery and less time spent on repetitive tasks.

4.)	Cognigy Cognigy is a global leader in Conversational AI Automation. Its platform, Cognigy.AI, enables enterprises to automate customer and employee communications using intelligent voice and chatbots

5.)

Consilium Software Consilium UniCloud™ UniCloud™ is an intuitive platform that allows Enterprises to deploy and manage their Unified Communication (UC) and Contact Center (CC) services with ease and entire provisioning can be completed in seconds using this comprehensive tool supporting digital transformation. The latest release 7.0 of UniCloud™ is a multi-tenant platform that transforms the delivery, management, and integration of collaboration and contact center solutions, for both Cloud and On-Premise deployment models. With its single-pane-of-glass views and quick provisioning tool, UniCloud™ is instrumental in reducing the time to provision an entire multi-cluster Cisco collaboration platform, including contact centers (C... (read more)UniCloud™ is an intuitive platform that allows Enterprises to deploy and manage their Unified Communication (UC) and Contact Center (CC) services with ease and entire provisioning can be completed in seconds using this comprehensive tool supporting digital transformation. The latest release 7.0 of UniCloud™ is a multi-tenant platform that transforms the delivery, management, and integration of collaboration and contact center solutions, for both Cloud and On-Premise deployment models. With its single-pane-of-glass views and quick provisioning tool, UniCloud™ is instrumental in reducing the time to provision an entire multi-cluster Cisco collaboration platform, including contact centers (CCX, UCCE, and PCCE), communications managers (CUCM), voicemail (Unity Connection) and IM & Presence by up to 85% which leads to the faster onboarding process for a new customer. A Self-Care portal within UniCloud™ is effectively managing services specific automation of MACDs (moves, adds, changes and deletes) allowing end-users to perform Day-2 related tasks of their own while reducing the basic operations workload of support teams. Consilium UniCloud™ enables enterprises and service providers to manage and automate the delivery of Cisco-based Unified Communications as a service (UCaaS) and Contact Center as a service (CCaaS) offerings using single, centralized management and easy-to-use administration interface, with role-based access providing granular control over permissions, limiting potentially unauthorized or inadvertent transactions. With its unified portal for UC and contact center provisioning, multi-tenancy and single-pane-of-glass views and tools, UniCloud™ introduces turn-key efficiency in onboarding new customers, provisioning of users, agents, teams, skill groups, and devices, or their migration from non-Cisco platforms to Cisco, and also provides centralized management and monitoring.

6.)	eGain Corporation eGain Solve Proven, Easy, and Guided Journey to Automate Customer Engagement in a Digital+AI World

7.)	Emmersion Automated Language Testing Emmersion offers automated assessments to quickly and accurately test speaking, writing, and grammar fluency in 9 languages and counting. We help contact centers improve CSAT scores by screening for top talent and retaining top performers.

8.)

OpsTel Services SPEED & PLUS The SPEED solution solves for service level issues while cost optimizing the environment with automation. Provides an enhanced way to speed up & optimize invoking temporary agent skills configuration changes into the contact center environment. Speed allows you to schedule both future changes & temporary changes that auto-revert back to the original state when scheduled time expires. Speed features: *Automated / Scheduled Temporary Agent Skills Configuration Management *Immediate Temporary or Reoccurring Schedule Skills Configuration Changes *Easy to Use/Operations Administration Focused *Descriptive Monitoring Activity Dashboard *Detailed “End to End’ Audit Trail and Perfor... (read more)The SPEED solution solves for service level issues while cost optimizing the environment with automation. Provides an enhanced way to speed up & optimize invoking temporary agent skills configuration changes into the contact center environment. Speed allows you to schedule both future changes & temporary changes that auto-revert back to the original state when scheduled time expires. Speed features: *Automated / Scheduled Temporary Agent Skills Configuration Management *Immediate Temporary or Reoccurring Schedule Skills Configuration Changes *Easy to Use/Operations Administration Focused *Descriptive Monitoring Activity Dashboard *Detailed “End to End’ Audit Trail and Performance Monitoring & PLUS provides a single interface, where operations teams no longer have to rely on HR, IT or any other organization to administer agent profile data across multiple technologies in the contact center. The PLUS solution allows for simplified provisioning & maintenance of agent profile data reducing processing time from days, weeks or months in LESS THAN 10 MINUTES! The PLUS features: *Agent Provisioning Cycle Time Reduced from Days/Weeks to 10 Minutes or Less *Fully Automated Agent Onboarding / Updating / Maintaining / and Offboarding of Agent Profiles (Identity, Access, Utilization) *Overlays and Enhances Existing Contact Center Solution Set *Enables Operations Staff to Maintain all Aspects of Managing an Agent’s Profile through “Single Pane of Glass” *Supports Multi-Faceted Agent Profile Attribute Configuration Requirements; e.g. Union Rules, Seniority Dates, Etc. *Detailed Agent Profile Audit Trails

 

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